ZickZack
I really like patreon since it allows creators some independence on the whims of platforms and advertising companies.
It also allows certain content that doesn’t (currently) work on e.g. youtube to exist: E.g. (very) long form videos or highly produced documentaries that may take half a year to plan and shoot just cannot exist within youtube due to the limited per-click revenue.
That doesn’t mean this system is perfect: E.g. I would like to have an option to put some money into a monthly pot, which gets distributed based on my viewing habits and current interests. E.g. Twitch has “bits” which can be bought in bulk and distributed freely as donations.
Having a monthly system for “tokens” according to which a monthly donation gets divided into (i.e. a person got 25% of my tokens, so he gets 25% of the pot) would be nice (this does have the potential issue of hurting long-form content, but I could still donate the normal way).
What you are alluding to is called “DIDs” = “Decentralized identifiers” (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier).
The idea of most of these methods is that you identify yourself using a private key, while a public key is spread throughout the network.
If you want to log into a server on that network, the server would “challenge” your identity by encrypting something (e.g. a random number) using the public key, which you, the holder of the private key, can then decrypt and send back to prove you are who you say you are.
This method is already standardized by the W3C, but only has been for less than a year. You also have to keep in mind that all federalized social network systems (such as lemmy and kbin) are still in early development.
While the inability to source is a huge problem, but you also have to keep in mind that complaining about AI has other objective beyond the obvious “AI bad”.
- it’s marketing: “Our thing is so powerful it could irreparably change someone’s life” is still advertising even if that irreparable change is bad. Saying “AI so powerful it’s dangerous” just sounds less advertis-y than “AI so powerful you cannot not invest in it” despite both leading to similar conclusions (you can look back at the “fearvertising” done during the original AI boom: same paint, different color)
- it’s begging for regulatory zeals to be put into place: Everyone with a couple of millions can build an LLM from scratch. That might sound like a lot, but it’s only getting cheaper and it doesn’t need highly intricate systems to replicate. Specifically the ability to finetune a large model with few datapoints allows even open-source non-profits like OpenAssistant to compete against the likes of google and openai: Google has made that very explicit in their leaked We have no moat memo. This is why you see people like Sam Altman talking to congress about the dangers of AI: He has no serious competetive advantage and hopes that with sufficient fear-mongering he can get the government to give him one.
Complaining about AI is as much about the AI as it is about the economical incentives behind AI.
Go to the relevant domain’s front page (e.g https://kbin.social/d/kbin.social for kbin.social).
The URL scheme is “https://kbin.social/d/DOMAINHERE” assuming you are currently on kbin.social.
On the right in the sidebar you can see “Domain” and below that options to subscribe or to block.
Really it’s the same thing as magazines, just that you generally don’t visit the domain itself.
And don’t forget that even after that you still have to watch baked-in “This video is sponsored by <insert shady company here>” adds since the actual revenue that gets passed to creators from youtube is so low that to keep the ship afloat they have to look for additional revenue streams.
Just as a quick check: are you sure you are in your “subscribed” view?
KBIN by default uses an “all” view, which you can change at the top right next to your username (the “table” menu).
Peertube is inherently very scalable with relatively little cost due to an artifact of all social media platforms: Most of the traffic is driven by a tiny amount of videos/magazines/etc…
For services like youtube, you can use this as a way to quickly cache data close to the place it’s going to be streamed: e.g. Netflix works with ISPs to install small servers at their locations to lessen the burden on their (and the ISPs) systems.
But with centralised systems you can only push this so far since ultimately everything is still concentrated at one central location.
Hypothetically, if you could stop this super-linear scaling for each user (you need to pay per user plus overhead generated from managing them at scale), you could easily compete against the likes of youtube simply because, at sufficient scale, all the other effects get ammortized away.
Peertube does exactly this by serving the videos as webtorrents: essentially this means that for every “chunk” of a video you downloaded, you also host that chunk for other people to download. That means that peertube itself theoretically only has to host every unique video once (or less than once since the chunks are in the network for a while), meaning you rid yourself of the curse of linear user scaling against users and only scale sub-linearly with the number of unique videos (how sub-linear depends on the lifetime for your individual torrents; i.e. how long a single video chunk stays available for others).
The costs that remain for every peertube instance is essentially the file hosting costs (and encoding the video, but that also only scales in the number of videos and could be pushed onto the uploader using WASM video encoders).
Storage itself isn’t cheap, but also not ungodly expensive (especially since you can ammortize the costs over a long time as you platform grows with storage prices in a continual massive decline).
Platforms like Netflix and youtube cannot do this because
- Netflix is a paid-service and people don’t want to do the hosting job for netflix after having already paid for the service
- Youtube has to serve adds which is incompatible with the “users host the content” method
In general torrenting is a highly reliable and well tested method that scales fantastically well to large data needs (it quite literally becomes more efficient the more people use it)
They choose to do this. Delicious has historically been a point and click developer, but they wanted to diversify, especially since their previous title “pillars of the earth” flopped. They first tried their have at rts with “a year of rain” which is simply not that good, and then looked into Gollum.
You also can’t raid make the argument that the project was rushed out the door, considering the game was supposed to release in 2021 (two years ago).
They tried something they had no experience in, not through coercion but because they wanted to, and produced a game of shockingly low quality. Since this wasn’t the first flop, but just the latest in a huge series of flops, (though it was the most expensive and high profile one) the studio closed.
I see no indication that this was a to down forced decision from management (just from having talked to some developers at Gamescom a couple of years ago).
The concept really wasn’t horrible it just looks like it now having seen the product, but a stealth have themed after Gollum is not a dumb idea.
There’s lots of stuff you could do, like e.g. use the ring for temporary invisibility but at the cost of losing some e.g. sanity resource you need to recover.
The problem with this game is that the idea being bad doesn’t even really factor into its quality since just the actual bare-bones graphics and fundamental gameplay is so broken that the lack of original ideas isn’t really a factor.
If this was just a no-thrills e.g. thief clone with a Gollum skin, nobody would bar an eye. The problem is that even this low bar of “some stealth game+Gollum” is not reached.
In fact, we have a very direct comparison to a different “Gollum like stealth have produced by an indie developer” that was a smash hit: “Styx: master of shadows” is a climbing based stealth have featuring a small green goblin like protagonist that has to deal with a powerful but risky to use substance.